Raag Darbari

[augusto pinto]

It appears that the monsoons are off season not only for the tourism industry in Goa, but also for Goa Book Club. Conversation on this channel has been desultory of late.

I don't understand why this should be so: if there's any season when Goa is at its most delightful its the months of June - July when the place is green, wet and luscious.

What better than to loll about in bed with a book in the hand occasionally looking at the rains lashing away and taking a nap when you feel like it!

Lest you think I'm a lotus-eater living the life that's lived as it should be, I have to disappoint you for it's only on a Sunday that such luxuries can be savored. 

Anyway the makers of Goan books have taken a holiday and methinks will resume normal operations only in August like the fishermen, with Selma Carvalho letting loose her Butcher, Baker, Doctor, Diplomat.

In the meanwhile I've found a book I had saved for a rainy day: Raag Darbari by Shrilal Shukla.

To be continued...

[Selma C]

I'm reading two at the moment,

The last word by Hanif Kurieshi (one of my all time favourite writers)

And terry eagleton's HOW TO READ literature.

If that's of any interest to anyone :-)

Take care,

Selma

Sent from my iPad

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[Eugene Correia]

How I wish I was in Goa during this time  -- paus poddta temdna. Love the rains and my heart jumps with joy with the noise of thunder. The smell of wet soil and the sound of piti-piti. 

Let CBC go for a slumber; it needs rest. 

Eugene

[Leonard Fernandes]

I am reading Conquerors by Roger Crowley. It concerns Portuguese expeditions beginning from the 15th century. Fascinating how a strong gust of wind essentially led to the discovery of Brazil.

Warm Regards,
Leonard J Fernandes

Co-founder and Director,

Dogears Print Media Pvt. Ltd.

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[V M]

Raag Darbari is one of my favourite books in the world. 'Gusto you do
demonstrate good taste...

#2, Second Floor, Navelkar Trade Centre, Panjim, Goa
Cellphone 9326140754 Office (0832) 242 0785

[Damodar Ghanekar]

I edited Raag Darbari in Konkani

for the Sahitya Akademi.

Damodar Ghanekar

Editor/ Translator

On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 12:05 AM, Eugene Correia <eugene....@gmail.com> wrote:

This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (eugene....@gmail.com) Add cleanup rule | More info

How I wish I was in Goa during this time  -- paus poddta temdna. Love the rains and my heart jumps with joy with the noise of thunder. The smell of wet soil and the sound of piti-piti. 

Let CBC go for a slumber; it needs rest. 

Eugene

On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 1:31 PM, 'Selma C' via The Goa Book Club <goa-bo...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

[augusto pinto]

Dear Dam-bab,

I'm eager to read your translation of Raag Darbari.

I'm reading Gillian Wright's English translation of the novel published by Penguin.

Even in Wright's translation Raag Darbari reads like a great Indian English novel.

I can recognize the places where Wright has to use a myriad of devices to convey Hindi into English. I would love to know how you approached the same problems.

I'm sure that translating into Konkani will be easier because the cultural context of Raag Darbari is more easily understood in Konkani than in in English.

However FN's constant accusation that I am partial to those who write in the Devanagari script and against those who write in the Romi script is an irritant.

Can you do something about this?
Augusto

[Braz MENEZES]

I can endorse Leonard's comment on Roger Crowley's Conquerors, which I read when it was first released last year. It is a massive read of over 400 hundred pages. Crowley fleshes out some of the grimmer aspects of the lives of the explorers and the crews that ventured forward in those early days, when tiny Portugal invested what little wealth it had, on an idea and dream of grandeur, and sailed forth on just hope and a prayer.He brings out a very readable concise, well researched period of Portuguese Imperial history, that did not perhaps receive full recognition, as British history (written by the the conquerors for their audiences) flooded the libraries of the erstwhile Commonwealth.

Closer home, of interest to GBC readers, is how years before landing in Brazil, Portugal's Bartholomew Diaz and his small fleet, sailed into a storm as they attempted to navigate the Cape of Southern Africa, were tossed out to sea for 3 days, and eventually blown back into the calmer  waters in Mossel Bay. Only then did the first European Explorer first round the Cape and initiate the modern period of colonialism in Africa and India and open doors for Goan emigration across the oceans.

Braz Menezes, author

Beyond the Cape- Sin, Saints, Slaves, and Settlers (Matata Books, Toronto)

 

 

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From: leonard....@gmail.com
Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2016 10:44:36 +0530
Subject: Re: [GOABOOKCLUB] Raag Darbari
To: goa-bo...@googlegroups.com

[jugneeta sudan]

What a coincidence - am reading the English translation of Raag Darbaari  in close study with the Hindi version

will review it shortly in my column 😉 

[Frederick FN Noronha * फ्रेड्रिक नोरोन्या * فريدريك نورونيا‎]

On 19 June 2016 at 21:38, augusto pinto <pint...@gmail.com> wrote:

In the meanwhile I've found a book I had saved for a rainy day: Raag Darbari by Shrilal Shukla.

In our MA class, we had these middle-aged women (this comment is not meant to be sexist or age-ist... but they were mostly married to high officials with, I guess, a lot of maids to look after the home work, and no real need to even think about earning a living). They  would bandy around names of works which we had never even read! That gave us a tremendous complex. Today, there's the Wikipedia, thank goodness:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raag_Darbari_(novel)

Raag Darbari (novel)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the raga, see Darbari Kanada.

Raag Darbari

Author	Sri Lal Sukla
Translator	Gillian Wright
Country	India
Language	Hindi
Publisher	Penguin Books Ltd (Translation)
Publication date	1968
Media type	Print
ISBN	81-267-0478-0 (First edition)

Raag Darbari is a 1968 Hindi novel written by Sri Lal Sukla, an author known for his social and political satire.^[1][2] He was awarded theSahitya Academy Award, the highest Indian literary award, in 1969 for this novel.^[3]

The novel highlights the failing values present in post-Independence Indian society. It exposes the helplessness of intellectuals in the face of a strong and corrupt nexus between criminals, businessmen, police and politicians.^[4][5]

The novel is narrated from the point of view of Ranganath, a research student in history, who comes to live with his uncle, Vaidyaji, in a village named Shivpal Ganj in Uttar Pradesh for a few months. He learns how his uncle uses all the village institutions — the village school, the village panchayat (a local elected body), the local government offices for his political purpose. The conduct of his uncle and the petty village politicians is in stark contrast to the ideals that Ranganath has learnt to aspire to during his university education.

The villagers take pride in calling themselves 'gunjahe', originating from 'ganj' of 'Shivpal ganj'.

Characters[edit]

Following is a list of some of the important characters in the book:

Vaidyaji: He is the mastermind behind all village politics. Very articulate in framing his sentences and choosing his words, Vaidyaji is also officially the manager of the local college.

Ruppan Babu: The younger son of Vaidyaji and the leader of college students Ruppan Babu has remained in the 10th grade the past many years, in the same college in which his father is manager.Ruppan Babu is actively involved in all village politics and is well respected in the village community due to his illustrious parentage. Towards the end of the novel a gradual change can be observed in his behaviour which can be attributed due to influence of Ranganath.

Badri Pehelwan: Elder brother of Ruppan babu. Badri keeps himself away from his fathers involvements and keeps himself busy in his body building exercises and taking care of his 'paalak baalak'(a term widely used for blind followers of a person - protege in refined English)

Ranganath: An MA in History, Ranganath is the nephew to Vaidyaji. He has come to Shivpalganj on a vacation for about 5–6 months. It appears that the author wants to give the view of the pathetic condition in the villages through the eyes of an educated person.

Chote Pehelwan: one of the 'paalak baalaks' of Badri pehelwaan, Chote is an active participant in village politics and is a frequent participant in the meetings summoned by Vaidyaji.

Principal Sahib: As the name denotes, Principal Sahib is the principal of the college. His relations with other members of the staff in college, forms an important part of the plot.

Khanna Master: One of the teachers in the college, he is up in arms against Principal sahab.

Jognath: the local goon, almost always drunk; speaks a unique language by inserting an "F" in between every 2 syllables.

Sanichar: His real name is Mangaldas but people call him Sanichar. He is a servant to Vaidyaji.He was later made the puppet pradhaan (leader) of village with the use of political tactics by Vaidyaji.

Langad: He is a representative of the hapless common man who has to bend in front of the corrupt government system even to get small things done.

Adaptation and performance[edit]

Based on Girish Rastogi's^[6] adaptation of Raag Darbari, Bahroop Arts Group^[7] staged 'Ranganath Ki Waapsi', directed by Rajesh Singh, a noted alumnus of National School of Drama, New Delhi, India on 18 November 2009 at Alliance Française de New Delhi.^[8]

References[edit]

1. Jump up^ Upendra Nath Sharma (23 September 2012). "'Raag Darbari': The chronicle of power and politics retold". The New Indian Express. Retrieved 2014-10-14.
2. Jump up^ University of Delhi (2005). Indian Literature: An Introduction. Pearson Education India. pp. 194–. ISBN 978-81-317-0520-9.
3. Jump up^ "Sahitya Akademi Awards listings". Sahitya Akademi, Official website.
4. Jump up^ "Tribute: Shrilal Shukla's work shocked India, left it naked". Rediff.com. November 3, 2011. Retrieved 2014-10-14.
5. Jump up^ Gillian Wright (Nov 1, 2011). "'A Wealth Of Experiences'". Retrieved 2014-10-14.
6. Jump up^ Girish Rastogi
7. Jump up^ staging Ranganath Ki Waapsi
8. Jump up^ Alliance Française de NEW DELHI

Categories: 

• 1968 novels
• 20th-century Indian novels
• Hindi-language novels
• Sahitya Akademi Award-winning works
• Satirical novels
• Political satire books
• Political corruption in India

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[Frederick FN Noronha * फ्रेड्रिक नोरोन्या * فريدريك نورونيا‎]

On 19 June 2016 at 23:01, 'Selma C' via The Goa Book Club <goa-bo...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

I'm reading two at the moment,

The last word by Hanif Kurieshi (one of my all time favourite writers)

And terry eagleton's HOW TO READ literature.

If that's of any interest to anyone :-)

Take care,

Selma

On Facebook, I was pulling Selma's cyber leg, pointing out to her that Terence Francis Eagleton FBA is actually a Marxist scholar. After all, isn't Selma also one of those who shares the JCian perspective that only if you're middle of the middle (or, let's say you claim to take a stand not to take a stand) you're kosher.

What's worse, Eagleton appears to be both Catholic and Marxist, which I guess in the British scheme of things means intolerance raised to the power of two.

Below, a 2013 comment on Eagleton's then new book. From the Guardian, which Selma likes to quote when it comes out with some Conservative-influenced tosh.

To me, the worrying aspect is how that the literary tastes and axioms of one tiny island is often allowed to affect the perspectives of the rest of the world. The predictable canon. Even if this is a dissenter.

Also, if we buy Eagleton's questioning of Value, then can there be "good taste" which VM was talking about this morning?

FN

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jul/26/how-read-literature-eagleton-review

How to Read Literature by Terry Eagleton – review

A shrewd and amiable stroll through the canon ends up championing some odd virtues

 No one cares whether you like the characters or not … Terry Eagleton.

 'Dostoevsky is better than Grisham in the sense that Tiger Woods is a better golfer than Lady Gaga' … Terry Eagleton. Photograph: Christopher Thomond

Steven Poole

Friday 26 July 2013 08.01 BST

Terry Eagleton was once the bad boy of English studies. His seminal textbook Literary Theory introduced generations of students to what their tutors feared was the mind-rotting influence of the continent. But his new book is a more traditional affair. Aimed at "readers and students", it is a personable stroll through a predictable canon: Charlotte Brontë, Forster, Keats, Milton, Hardy et al – plus JK Rowling, perhaps thrown in so as not to appear snobbish. The avuncular prof cautions his audience not to read in certain ways (no one cares whether you like the characters or not), and aims to show, through close reading of selected passages of poetry and prose, how to appreciate the best of what's been thought and said.

As is generally the case with the later Eagleton, the book is often funny, and it is trying hard to be funny slightly more often than that. The best jokes are also critical observations, eg that Shakespeare's Othello "is a man who seems curiously aware that he is speaking Shakespearean blank verse". Running throughout is a bracing critique of modernity: Eagleton attributes most faulty assumptions about what literature should do and how we should read it – for example, "the doctrine of literature as self-expression", which he dismantles with delicious sarcasm – to the unexamined nostrums of what he calls, variously, "individualist society", "modern individualism" or "a robustly individualist social order".

 

Eagleton has many interesting things to say – as it were, in passing – about Conrad, Milton and so on, in a series of thematic chapters that focus in turn on "Openings", "Character", "Narrative", "Interpretation" and "Value". There are some longueurs, as when he devotes four pages to an elaborate reading of the nursery rhyme "Baa Baa Black Sheep" in order to show why such an interpretation is under-justified by the text, but overall it's an amiable affair. Charming, too, to find that Eagleton is a kind of happy existentialist who finds support for such an attitude in modernist (and proto-postmodernist) literature. "Works of fiction like Tristram Shandy, Heart of Darkness, Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway," he remarks with cheering optimism, "can serve to free us from seeing human life as goal-driven, logically unfolding and rigorously coherent. As such, they can help us to enjoy it more."

The book's knottiest chapter is the last, on "Value", in which Eagleton considers various criteria for what literary value might be and gleefully demolishes them all. Must good literature be groundbreakingly original? In that case, Eagleton points out, "we would be forced to deny the value of a great many literary works, from ancient pastoral and medieval mystery plays to sonnets and folk ballads". Should literature speak to our everyday concerns? Balls to that: "If we are inspired only by literature that reflects our own interests, all reading becomes a form of narcissism. The point of turning to Rabelais or Aristophanes is as much to get outside our own heads as to delve more deeply into them."

 

Nor, Eagleton demonstrates incisively, can we demand profundity ("There can be a superb art of the surface") or coherence ("many an effective postmodern or avant-garde work is centreless and eclectic"), or richness of narrative (see Waiting for Godot). Nonetheless, he insists, there are criteria for determining literary value. The criteria are "public", and embedded in the set of "social practices" known as "literary criticism". It is thanks to the existence of such criteria that he is confident in pronouncing: "Dostoevsky is better than [John] Grisham in the sense that Tiger Woods is a better golfer than Lady Gaga."

It is only when Eagleton wields his own positive criteria that things go awry: they seem to spring, unargued-for, from the same Romantic-influenced, individualist modernity about which he is elsewhere so sardonic. One signal virtue, it suddenly turns out, is spontaneity. Eagleton berates a passage from John Updike because "There is nothing spontaneous about it," and laments of an extract from William Faulkner that it has "an air of spontaneity about it which is almost entirely fabricated".

One wonders how Eagleton imagines that any paragraph composed by a serious writer could show a spontaneity that was unfabricated. Fabrication is the name of the game. All airs of spontaneity, as well as any other literary effects, have to be carefully fabricated by their authors. Truly "spontaneous" writing must be that to which the author has given no thought at all, and so which is certain to be rubbish: the kind of stuff, perhaps, that writing gurus instruct their students to perpetrate for 10 minutes first thing in the morning to clear the mental pipes, but which is hardly meant for public consumption. All writing is a machine for the delivery of a time-delayed and space-shifted performance. The more spontaneous has been the machine's assembly, the less reliable will be its functioning. One should trust "spontaneous" writing just as much as a spontaneously knocked-together motorcycle.

 

Things don't improve much when Eagleton, discussing Evelyn Waugh, praises the "honesty" of his prose. What does this mean, in the context of people who are making things up? And one might very well share Eagleton's judgment that Waugh is better than John Updike (as I do) without for a moment supposing (as Eagleton seems to imply) that Waugh is somehow any less concerned with choosing just the right words and arranging them in just the right order.

A literary-criticism virgin would be well served by this book's account of what good criticism is not, and perhaps inspired by many of its tartly illuminating aperçus on canonical dead authors. It would be a shame, though, if readers felt subsequently encouraged to judge writing according to its perceived qualities of "honesty" and "spontaneity". Yet some such quibbles are probably inevitable with any general positive account of the virtues of literature. All good writing is fundamentally mysterious, even though its plumbing lies in plain view. Flann O'Brien, to the opening of whose The Third Policeman Eagleton devotes some admiring sentences, can make you burst out laughing with the right word in the right place, but it's difficult to explain exactly why. Perhaps the most you can do is to point it out and invite others to laugh with you.

• Steven Poole's You Aren't What You Eat is published by Union Books.

[Jeanne Hromnik]

I'm reading An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sachs.

It's raining here too -- heavily. And it's cold (max 14 degrees C tomorrow).

Jeanne

[V M]

"Also, if we buy Eagleton's questioning of Value, then can there be
"good taste" which VM was talking about this morning?"

It is interesting (perhaps mainly to me) that Frederick and I have
been discussing this specific matter for decades, sometimes with
acrimony. Each of us are fundamentalists, as has been proven over and
over and over again. But obviously, I am right and he is wrong!

VM

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[augusto pinto]

Dear VM

Why do you respond to that fool Friedrich? Do you need to be told that he is tasteless?

Let me explain: when you or I read a book we savor it for all it is worth and we tell others whether the book is good, bad or indifferent.

Friedrice on the other hand never tastes anything for himself - no Raag Darbari or Terry Eagleton or  Mario Serafia Afonso or Gajanan Jog or Vincy Quadros for him.

Instead he will Google and then quote to you what Wikipedia or The Guardian has to say and fling it on your face as if that is the final word on the subject.

Bah!!
Augusto

[Jose Colaco]

On 21 June 2016 at 05:00, augusto pinto <pint...@gmail.com> wrote:

"Dear VM.....Why do you respond to that fool Friedrich? Do you need to be told that he is tasteless?"

Comment:

While I am not even an amateur in the 'tasting' of guys...with or without some nice Portuguese vinho (esp Dao)....Augusto's comment did bring some taste to my taste buds. I was reminded of this delightful Chana Masala I had fixed. Will share this pic with you.

Sakkor poddo amchea tondanth.

jc

[Jose Colaco]

On Jun 20, 2016, at 10:29 AM, Frederick FN Noronha * wrote:

.......the JCian perspective that only if you're middle of the middle (or, let's say you claim to take a stand not to take a stand) you're kosher.

COMMENT:

Baba FN ! 

Beshtencch Kiteak Fuloita Re, Saiba ?

jc

[Jeanne Hromnik]

Dear Jose

'All good writing is fundamentally mysterious, even though its plumbing lies in plain view.'

I suppose the same applies to your channa dish, which suits your tastes and of which the main ingredient is evident and the recipe probably available. However, it is the 'mysterious' composition that is crucial and depends on the balance of flavours, on texture, etc, to make a good dish. The same applies, I believe, in literary criticism, where tastes may differ but value still applies.

Best

Jeanne

[Jose]

Dear Jeanne,

I agree with you.

BTW: I withdraw the 'Kiteak Fuloita' question I had posed to the good FN. I have found the answer. A very special Full Moon was out...on Mon/Tues.

jc

[V M]

Frederick is one of my oldest + best friends, and no one can change that.

About taste, he has a very different perspective. I differ strongly.
That is that (also he is totally wrong).


VM